The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes eBook

Sometimes—­though this was scarcely a relief—­another
befuddled gentleman would be left at the uninhabited
lodge in his stead. That was chiefly after hunt
dinners or card and claret parties, when a new coachman
would take a quartet of gentry home, all clouded as
to their identities. “Arrah now! they’ve
got thimselves mixed! let thim sort thimselves.”
And the coachman would grab at the nearest limb, extricate
it and its belongings from the tangle, and prop the
total mass against the first gate he passed.
And so with the rest.

Eileen’s mother, who was as remarkable for her
microscopic piety as for the beauty untarnished by
a copious maternity, figured in the child’s
memories as a stout saint who moved with a rustle of
silken skirts and heaved an opulent black silk bosom
relieved by a silver cross.

“Who are you?” her spouse would inquire
with an oath.

“It’s your wife I am, Bagenal dear,”
she would reply cheerfully. For she had grown
up in the four-bottle tradition, and intoxication appeared
as natural for the superior sex as sleep. Both
were temporary phases, and did not prevent men from
being the best of husbands and creatures when clear.
And when the marketwomen or the beggarwomen respectfully
inquired of her, “How is your good provider?”
she made her reply with no sense of irony, though
she had been long paying the piper herself. And
the piper figured literally in the household accounts,
as well as the fiddler, for the O’Keeffe was
what the mud cabins called a “ginthleman to the
backbone.”

II

Family tradition necessitated that Eileen should at
least complete her education at a convent in the outskirts
of Paris, and her first communion was delayed till
she should “make” it in that more pious
atmosphere. The O’Keeffe convoyed her across
the two Channels, and took the opportunity of visiting
a “variety” theatre in Montmartre, where
he was delighted to find John Bull and his inelegant
womenkind so faithfully delineated. So exhilarated
was he by this excellent take-off and a few bocks
on the Boulevard, that he refused to get down from
the omnibus at its terminus.

“Jamais je ne descendrai, jamais,”
he vociferated. Eileen was, however, spared the
sight of this miniature French revolution. She
was lying sleepless in the strange new dormitory,
watching the nun walking up and down in the dim weird
room reading her breviary, now lost in deep shadow
with the remoter beds, now lucidly outlined in purple
dress with creamy cross as she came under the central
night-light. Eileen wondered how she could see
to read, and if she were not just posing picturesquely,
but from the fervency with which she occasionally
kissed the crucifix hanging to the rosary at her side
Eileen concluded she must know the office by heart.
Her own Irish home seemed on another planet, and her
turret-bedroom was already far more shadowy than this:
presently both were swallowed up into nothingness.